I live in a part of Vancouver you’d probably call skidrow. It’s denizens are beggars, junkies, strung out prostitutes, the homeless, and the mentally ill. Most of these folks own nothing and have no income. And most of them depend on the neighbourhood’s various social services for bare survival. Most Vancouverites shuddler at the thought of coming to Main and Hastings. But despite the area’s deep social and moral problems, it hardly lives up to (or down to) its reputation. Indeed most of these sallow wandering souls are harmless and pass right through you on the street.

My neighbourhood lies right on the edge of a spreading downtown gentrification. Vancouver’s isn’t really the planned-and-scheduled-land-developer-mega-project sort that most cities buy (I saw this in Dallas recently, and it felt about as natural as a snowy Christmas tree in Tucson). Rather, Vancouver’s is a more organic gentrification, the kind that happens as the city’s physical core fills and expands pushing its edges out slightly further with each year.

However my neighbourhood might not be gentrifiable. All of the social service the homeless and desperate need are right here. So it will be very interesting to see how the tension between the homeless clinging to the few entitlements they feel they have and the aspirations of a new neighbourhood wanting to realize its larger, cleaner potential.

I bring this up as a paralell to what seems to be happening in some Indian cities when information age riches clash with stone age poverty over the right to live in the same place. In Mumbai developers who take land to build fancy new condos have started to set aside some of the land to build homes for the shanty dwellers they displace–a strategy that would find more than a few supporters here.

However its not all milk and honey in India’s free-homes-for-the-destitute experiment. The new living arrangements apparently destroy the intimate social connections that grew like weeds in the old shanty–connections that in many ways were the only things of value those people had. Well the old shanty dwellers ain’t exactly thrilled with their new digs as a results.

This is interesting because…

• its a great lesson in unintended consequences
• its also a great related lesson in the limits of design and human intentionality
• and lastly it makes me wonder about how any similar homes-for-the-homeless plans might work out here

Do check out the slideshow

I nice intro to Don Norman and his work. Whether you’ve only heard his name or you one many of his book, this is a nice short intro to Norman and his rather common-sensical work. Thanks to Niti for this one.

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To carry the original analogy into music, Frank Sinatra is a stylist, while Tom Waits is a designer.

Sinatra was a marvellous stylist. He was able to take virutally any song and make it sound like his. But he never wrote the lyrics, and he never wrote the music. Creatively Sinatra was barren, all he did was put his signature on other people’s work. He didn’t make anything new. But he did make songs sound way cooler then they ever had before.

Waits on the other hand is every bit as cool and distinctive a vocal stylist as Sinatra, soaking each song he touches in sweaty hot bourbon. But Waits also writes the lyrics, the music, and the identites that sit somewhere in front of the songwiter but behind the voice in the song.

Ok, I’ll try to stop harping about this (…for a while).

Here is another example of the stylists aesthetic of complexity–as opposed to the designer’s philosophy of simplicity (check out Stylists != Designers).

This is a gorgeous diagram, filled with nuanced shadings, a subtle and tasteful color palette (I especially like the orange and green combination), captivating visual patterns, and seductive symetries. Its also an excersize is specious visual meaninglessness and obfuscating info-decoration. What does this thing mean?!

Oh, and it has 14 different rolleover states that magnify and highlight different areas with explosions of seeming information. Information like “[t]here is a vacuum of solid evidence into which can rush our most troublesome weaknesses as human decision-makers.” Yikes. Sounds heavy. And sounds a hell of a lot more complicated than its needs to be–which is exactly what the stylist’s aethetic of complexity is all about.

This diagram illustrates a basic design process, and is perhaps the most attractive, most complicated and least intelligeble representations of a design process I’ve ever seen.

I do love the irony of the company’s tag line: “The Art of Complex Problem Solving”

Niti gave a great speach at the CII last week. Even Bruce Nussbaum noticed — looks like our nascent global initiative is getting noticed.

These ideas are still fresh (which is another way of saying that they are unfinished), so take with a grain of salt.

Apparently there’s gold rush over there in India and China. They want stuff, lots of stuff, and we only just have to sell it to them. Well not so fast there Tex. There are two factors to consider: demand, and capacity to satisfy demand (and where people have limited capacity, they must then prioritize thier demands)

Sure places like India and China are experiencing both rising demand and rising capacity to pay for their demands. However what they demand, thier capacity to satisfay demand, and how they prioritize thier demands in the face capacity limitations, are all very different from what we find here in the west. To succeed in introducing new products to bottom of the pyramid markets means understanding how approach these issues.

For instance, cell phones are an incredibly popular product in developing countries, despite the fact that their cost relative to income makes them very expensive. Certainly part of the reason is a lacking wireline communication infrastructure. But this is only helps explain demand, not either thier capacity to pay for a cell phone nore the high priority placed on cell phone ownership.

What allows people in developing countries to afford the high relative cost of a cell phone is the fact that these devices provide an actual return on investment–they make money. Cell phones do this by accelerating the flow of existing wealth within an economy.

If you have $1 it takes a year from the day you spend it for it to come back to you (you buy a loaf of bread from a baker who buys some wheat form from a farmer who buys the charcoal from you), you will not be in a hurry to spend that $1. However if it takes only a day for the $1 to come back, you won’t think twice about spending it.

Now, what makes cell phone ownership a high priority for people of limited capacity? Cell phones acclerate the flow of wealth which grows purchasing power without having to first increase the total money supply in the economy. This gets into all sorts of arcane macro economics, so lets keep this practical. Imagine you live in a part of the world where it can take weeks just to negotiate a replacement part for your broken tractor. It costs you the same price for the part, but getting it this part tomorrow means harveting your crops on time, while getting it in three weeks means getting a lower price for over ripe produce.

Accelerating the flow of wealth like this is almost like getting something for nothing: increased purchasing power with no foreign direct investment, no charity and no bloating work hours.

Toothpaste, dvd players, and even dishwashers will not have this same kind of direct and immediate effect on an economy. So while folks in bottom of the pyramid market may want such things, they can neither pay for no will they priority such purchases because these kinds of products don’t repay their investment price the way a cell phone does.

Distinguishing products this way (those that accelerate the flow of wealth vs. those that don’t) seems to provide a lot of insight into what kinds of new products will and won’t succeed in bottom of the pyramid markets. However, like i warned, this theory is still pretty fresh (it may even have to go back in the oven for a while).

The Four Seasons’s hotel chain boasts a rather luxurious brand. So why have they started serving it up with a side of spam?

Several weeks ago I sent them an email asking if there was an ATM in thier Buenos Aires hotel. Not only did it take them several weeks to get back to me, but they didn’t even answer my question–a fairly straight forward one I thought.

Now I find myself getting spamed with thier promos. They didn’t have time to answer my rather simple question, but they sure did find time to add my email address to thier spambots. Well that’s totally cheap Four Seasons. There are lots of luxury hotel chains in the world, which makes it near effortless for me to never stay at one of yours.

The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. I’ve started planning a kitchen renovation, went to Buenos Aires, got caught up in a flood of business opportunities, and I’m now packing up for a trip to Delhi.

While BA was all pleasure, Delhi will be all work. My first reason to go to Dehli is to attend the Design with India conference. My second reason is a set of meetings and cultural research related to a new design and branding venture for emerging markets. This new venture is a globe spanning joint effort between me in Vancouver, Niti in San Fransisco, Manuel Toscano (you need a blog Manny!) in New York and Tasos Calantzis in Centurion South Africa.

This is exciting stuff, and not just for me either. Big changes in world are openning new doors (while also shutting others). Stay tuned!

This is pure brilliance from an underrated brilliant man. Carlin likes to hold a mirror up to our uglier sides. Here he makes a delicious beat poetry of advertising and self-delusional bullshit. I particularly love how he juxtaposes situationally contradictory words in the same phrase to show how on the one hand they are contradictory, and on the other how bullshit frighteningly reconciles all contradictions in its ultimate meaninglessness. Like I said, brilliant stuff.

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It has been a great trip, but today is the last day. We have a few things to try to squeez into the waning hours. All in all its has been fantastic. BA is a great city, and in 2 weeks we just started to get to know her. I’ll post more when I get back. For know I need to pack.